Giving away free gifts is excellent marketing. It fosters loyalty and brand recognition. I’m giving away free 2012 calendars as PDFs. I’m also making available the InDesign and Illustrator files that were used to create the PDFs, so you can create and brand your own calendars and do the same thing, if you so wish!

Branded calendars are classic marketing materials because they are the sort of thing that “hang around” for the whole year. So your logo and your marketing message will be seen for much longer than just a few days.

Literally thousands of visitors arrive at this site every year to download these calendars.

Free 2012 Calendars to download as a PDF file

I have two PDFs here for free download. One has the whole year on a single page and the other is a 12 page document with a month on every page.

You may like to download the above PDFs by going right-click and choosing “Save as…” or “Save target as…”.

Free 2012 Calendars to download as Illustrator files

The calendar which has the whole year on one page was created in Adobe Illustrator. Here is a version in Illustrator CS5 saved as an Adobe Illustrator file (.AI) plus, for those of you with earlier versions of Illustrator, there is an EPS saved as an Illustrator 9 file.

All of the PDFs, InDesign and Illustrator files

And here are the two calendars as PDFs, the two different Illustrator files and all the various InDesign files all together in a ZIP file.

Linked text frames/boxes

Both calendars have linked text boxes in the InDesign and Illustrator files. This means that you can use these calendars in 2013, 2014, 2015, and every year to come by just shunting the numbers on in the boxes. So if one month starts on a Monday in 2012 and a Tuesday in 2013, you can just add an extra carridge return or frame break and all the dates will move over to the correct days.

Regular readers and new readers

I apologise to my regular readers who have seen this last year and a big “hello” to new readers who have come to this site for the first time to download these calendars. You would not believe how much traffic I get from this giveaway, which is why I do it every year.

Is it a bit early to give away 2012 calendars in mid-October 2011? I don’t think so. Now is about time graphic designers get requests to do calendars for the next year. I am seeing from my Google Analytics that I’m already getting traffic from people searching for “2012 calendars to download” or such-like, so I thought it best to create them now.

So, if you’ve found this useful please feel free to Tweet, Like or vote for this article and, if it’s not too early to say it, Happy New Year! 🙂

Ah, I’m with you now, Brian. I was looking at the dates for each month not the tinted “carry over” days. I had indeed made a mistake with the November “carry over” days in December of the one page Illustrator one. All versions (AI, EPS and PDF) are now updated. Thanks, Buddy!

Am so grateful i don’t even know which words to use to express myself. Struggled quite a lot because am working on my website you see above there so working on the calendar was going to cost me dear time. Thanks a million thanks a million. If you ever want anything from Africa contact me. Thanks